You did mention Reddit but I don't think you realize the number of people who go there purely for the discussion. I saw that Steve Martin picture. I would wager that, unlike you, most of the commentors don't give a crap who the kid is or why he was with celebrities. The tangents you don't like are what keeps people coming back. That and the in-jokes and memes.
I think Slashdot is another good example of a site where the threaded comments are usually more interesting than the stories themselves.

It's been six years since I wrote Discussions: Flat or Threaded? and, despite a bunch of evolution on the web since then, my opinion on this has not fundamentally changed. If anything, my opinion has strengthened based on the observed data: precious few threaded discussion models survive on t...

I understand why you made the announcement, but part of me thinks you would have been better off to work with all of your partners in private to produce something quickly. People are already trying to tell you how this needs to be done (including me, I guess). The only thing worse than work produced by a committee is when the committee solicits input from the general public.
I do like that you are starting with Gruber's basic description. If I were running this, I would limit the scope of the initial release to what Gruber describes as much as possible. The smallest possible spec with reference implementation should be all you need for v1.0.
Good luck. You're probably going to piss off as many people as you please with what you eventually release.

Markdown is a simple little humane markup language based on time-tested plain text conventions from the last 40 years of computing. Meaning, if you enter this… …you get this! Lightweight Markup Languages ============================ According to **Wikipedia**: > A [lightweight markup lan...